I am reaching out to you as a brother in Christ, because I am concerned with your health. While I am not a medical doctor or a psychiatrist, I have observed in you symptoms of a condition that may affect your ability to be elected president or affect your fitness to govern if you are elected.

Let me back up. At first I was confused by your defense of admitted child molester, Josh Duggar. While it is Christian to forgive, and your compassion for a sexual predator was admirable, it seemed like an odd stance in today’s political climate for a man seeking higher office to publicly align himself with a sexual criminal, but now it makes sense why you had so much empathy for him.

This is nothing to be ashamed of, Governor, the condition you suffer from disproportionately strikes those of us who, like you and me, are male, heterosexual and cisgender. The fact that you are rich and white puts you at even greater risk. You, sir, suffer from a pathological urge to take your basest desires to sexually exploit those with less power and agency than you, and attribute them to others with less power and agency than you.

While I’m thrilled that these revelations about you and Josh Duggar are bringing this horrible affliction to light, allow me to dole out some perspective: Your desire to ogle naked, teenage girls has nothing to do with the lives of people whose sincerely held belief (see what I did there) is that they were born the wrong physical gender and are willing to clear the hurdles (medical, financial, societal and other) to correct this fact and live as their authentic selves.

To put it bluntly, Governor Huckabee, you are not a machine that shines light through a transparency to display an image on a screen. So please, stop projecting.

In closing, it is my understanding that you wish to be president of the United States. Allow me to reacquaint you with the job descriptions: the president represents all Americans, not just the ones who think and feel as he does.

I’m going to address something that I see quite a bit of on social media, but never hear anyone talk about.

There’s a decent number of women in my life that I find interesting and want to get to know better, but with whom I don’t have the kind of relationship where we make plans to hang out, and if I were to suddenly try, it might seem like I was asking them out on a date whether I was or not.

At least a couple times a month, one of these women will post something on Facebook like this:

“I’m going for a hike today, who wants to come with me?”

Or:

“I’ll be a Black Thorn Pub in about an hour if someone wants to join me for a drink.”

Or:

“I’m binge watching Arrested Development on Netflix at my place tonight. Private massage me for the address if you want to swing by.”

Every time this happens, I get excited. I instinctively reach for the keyboard to respond. Here’s a chance to get some social time with this woman I’m interested in. Awesome.

Then the voice in my head kicks in. It says that this is a public post visible to everyone of her Facebook friends, of which she has about a thousand. She wasn’t thinking about me when she made that post. She probably doesn’t even remember friending me on Facebook and forgot I can see her feed. If I respond to this message or show up where she announced she will be, it will look really desperate and she will regret having posted this status update. In fact, the next time she thinks about making a similar post, she’ll remember that time David Wraith showed up and how awkward it was and then decide against it [like the time a guy I really didn’t want to hang out with, showed up at the bar where I was because he saw I’d checked-in there on Foursquare, and for months afterward, I only checked-in places as I was leaving to avoid that happening again].

Then the voice in my head tells me that out of her thousand Facebook friends, there’s probably only about thirty people she really wants to hang out with, and out of that thirty she’s hoping only about half a dozen with respond, and I am not one of those people. Then the voice in my head asks why didn’t she just send a private group message to those thirty people or adjust the privacy settings on her post so only they would see it. Then I’m pissed at her for being lazy and playing with my emotions, and then she and I are in a fight that only I am aware of, and then I’m thinking about unfriending or unfollowing her to prevent her from ruining my day like this in the future.

Note: This is a guest blog I wrote on the Clothed Female Naked Male fetish (or CFNM) for kinkandpoly.com.

A few years ago I was at a munch and I was complaining that since my first Dom had moved out of state, I was having no luck recreating my ideal situation: providing service to a dominant woman while nude. It seemed like a no-brainer: someone else does your dishes, your laundry, your vacuuming or cleans your bathroom floor, and as a bonus, if you’re so inclined, you get to ogle him while he’s naked. Sounds like a win-win, to me. So why was it so difficult to manifest? “I just want a woman to strip me naked and tell me what to do. Is that too much to ask?”

The Dom I was complaining to looked at me like I was not too swift and said, “Dude, just go online and look for a Dom that’s into CFNM.”

“SEE-EFFIN-What?” I asked.

“C.F.N.M.…” she searched my eyes for any recognition. She found none. “Clothed Female Naked Male.”

Well I’ll be damned, I thought. My whole adult life I knew that I was into being naked in the presence of clothed women, but I had no idea there was a name for it, let alone an acronym. It was just this thing I liked to do. Who knew it was “a thing?”

When I first got involved with BDSM, it was the mid-90s. The internet existed, but not like we know it today. There was no such term as “social media.” There was no Fetlife, no CollarMe, no Adult Friend Finder. I found my first lifestyle dominatrix by answering a classified ad in a newspaper. A lifestyle Dom was looking for a service submissive and, after a brief interview, she accepted me.

It was great at first. I got the same nervous rush the first few times I entered the home of a relative stranger to be bossed around and pressed into servitude. It usually involved me performing some simple household chores, then getting on my knees and giving her a foot massage.But after the first few times, the novelty wore off and it just felt like helping out a friend around the house. Something was missing. It just didn’t feel submissive enough.

I was somewhat shy back then, so it took some effort on my part to work up the nerve to request what I really wanted, but I asked if I could serve her in the nude. To which she responded, words to the effect of, “Hell yeah!” The enthusiastic yes was important. Of course, if she had just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Sure… I guess… if you want to…” I still would have done it, but the fact that she seemed excited about receiving my naked service made it all the more exciting for me.

From that point on, whenever I arrived at her home, the first thing she did was order me to take my clothes off, then she gave me my chores for the day. The simple act of disrobing became a meaningful ritual. Every moment that I was naked in her presence was charged with erotic energy. I felt like I was truly submitting to her. Some people get this from being beaten, some from being collared, some from being tied up, and yes, all those things work for me too, but the moment I took my clothes off for her was like instantly going into subspace.

I can’t say for sure what my Dom got out of the arrangement. Perhaps she just enjoyed the sight of my naked body. Perhaps she got turned on by the visual representation of her power over me. (After all, it would be years before I ever saw my Dom out of her clothes. Sometimes, in those early days, she would wear short skirts with no panties, sit with her legs open and order me not to look.) Or maybe she just enjoyed having access to any part of my body whenever she wanted. I’d like to think it was all of the above. Being naked at all times meant that in between formal scenes, if she just wanted to dig her fingernails in to my back and claw me from shoulder to waist while I was dusting, she could. If she wanted to slap my bare ass while I was vacuuming her rug, she could. If she wanted to sneak up behind me while I was doing the dishes and flog my balls – while also ordering me to keep scrubbing the plate that I had clutched in both hands for fear of dropping and breaking it – she could. And she did.

Then there was the humiliation and objectification aspect of it. Once I had become comfortable being naked when my Dom and I were alone, she started inviting other people over while I was serving her. She would entertain guests and have me serve them tea in the nude.There were times when my Dom and I were alone and she would send me to another part of the house to perform a chore, and by the time I finished and came back for another assignment, unbeknownst to me, friends of hers would have arrived and I would walk in the room naked and meet a total stranger. When my Dom began mentoring other young doms, she enjoyed showing me off to them. They’d see me in passing as I worked and say things like, “Hey, nice ass!” the kinds of cat-calls that women dealt on a regular basis, but men almost never did until they found themselves in a situation like mine. Once, my Dom ordered me to masturbate in her living room and wouldn’t let me clean myself off until her young trainee had been called in to admire me, naked on the floor with cum sprayed across my belly.

As a nudist, the most interesting thing to me about the CFNM dynamic is that it feels absolutely nothing like being naked around clothed people in a non-dominance/submission environment. Taking off my clothes as an act of submission completely changes the experience for me, psychologically. I’ve been very fortunate to find dominant women for whom being served by a naked man tripped their triggers the same way that offering naked service trips mine.

My Bare As You Dare clothing optional workshop has been called “life changing.” I think it’s safe to say that writer Katie Lewis of Motif Magazine got more than she bargained for when she attended:

“My dare this month was to prove that my clothes don’t make the woman by taking the Bare as you Dare clothing-optional workshop at this year’s Fetish Fair Flea.

I figured it would be easy. Get naked and socialize? Piece of cake! But when I entered the workshop, my feelings changed entirely. People of all shapes, sizes and ages entered the room, and clothes started to hit the floor. I wondered, are ALL these people gonna get naked?” Read the entire article here.

Sexual hang-ups. We all have them. However, whenever I discuss mine, I’m always met with surprise. It’s as if, because of the work I do (as co-founder of Sex Positive St. Louis, as a traveling sex educator and freelance sexual guru) I’m expected to have absolutely no sexual hang-ups at all.

I’m human. I’m not made of wood, people. Prick me; I bleed (except that one time in 2002 when the EMTs couldn’t test my blood sugar because I was so dehydrated that after several needle sticks, I, in fact, did not bleed).

So here’s one of my sexual hang-ups:

Assholes.

Not people who are rude or annoying. Actual assholes. The anus. It grosses me out. Shit comes out of it.

I tried anal intercourse (unsuccessfully) when I was 16, and then not again until 20 years later when, during vaginal intercourse, a partner just took my dick and put it in their ass. I wasn’t even sure what was happening at first. The only other anal intercourse experience I can recall as a top was the time when the condom we were using got completely obliterated without me noticing. I pulled out, looked down, saw the split condom blooming around the base of my dick like flower petals or a gun with its barrel peeled back.

This was followed by the awkward moment when I had to tell my partner that we had just had unprotected anal sex. And this was followed by a trip to the St. Louis Effort for AIDS for HIV testing…

I’ve had anal intercourse as a bottom exactly once and that was shortly after I turned 40. Yeah, I waited a good while on that one. So there you have it. I’m a forty-one-year-old sex educator who’s had anal intercourse about three time. That’s how asshole-phobic I am.

The sad irony is that I love the ass as a concept. But until pretty recently my love of the ass has been confined to the cheeks and maybe (when I’m feeling really adventurous) the crack. The asshole terrifies and grosses me out.

I’m trying to get over this. I’m trying to embrace the ass as a whole, which means embracing the ass as a hole.

Until recently, I had only eaten ass a couple times in my entire life. I’m trying to eat ass more enthusiastically now. It’s quite a leap for someone as squeamish and germaphobic as me (I hate using public bathrooms. Actually, I hate using anyones bathroom but my own). I have to admit that part of what turns me about eating ass is that it feels really dirty and wrong. I’m almost worried that if I overcome my hang-ups about the anus entirely, it will cease to be as much of a turn on, but these are the occupational hazards I’m willing to risk on my road to being a better sexual guru. You’re welcome.

I has occurred to me that my encounters with ass have been so fraught with fear and mystery in part because I’ve never really looked at an anus before. My normal encounters with the asshole have been in the dark, by candlelight or even when under normal lighting conditions, I’m too close and too focused on the job I’m performing to really look at the asshole.

To remedy this, I asked a friend to let me shoot a portrait of her asshole and she agreed. I approached it like any other portrait shoot (aside from the fact that the key light was on a boom, lowered to the floor and pointed up). Since it was a portrait, I used a long lens (250mm) to flatter the asshole and not give it any wide angle distortion.

During the shoot and while reviewing the photos I discovered that assholes are (or at least can be) very cute, and are not nearly as scary as I would have thought.

Oh, and if anyone would like me to shoot a portrait of their asshole, just holla atcha boy. I also gives volume discounts, so feel free to book me for your next asshole portrait party.

I had the pleasure of staying in the home of author Laura Antoniou and her lovely wife Karen. I knew I was in the right place when I saw the Revenge of the Jedi poster in their guest bedroom (side note, as card-carrying member of the Star Wars fan club, I got a Revenge of the Jedi patch in the mail the year before the movie was released. I’m pretty sure I had already lost it by the time it was announced that the title of the movie would be changed).

My first night in New York I went to a BDSM party at a club called the Parthenon. They were playing really good music from Pandora, but it was the free version, so in the middle of the really intense scene, there would be car insurance commercials, which kinda broke the mood.

After the party we went walking around Manhattan looking for a place to get coffee at 1 a.m. and ended up in a 24 hour McDonalds. The girl behind the counter took one look at my date (six-foot tall in her boots and dressed from head to toe in black leather with matching gloves) and asked, “Do you ride motorcycles or hunt vampires?” Then she looked at me and said, “You must be her sidekick.”

The next day was the reading at Purple Passion. Karen had to drive us from Queens to Brooklyn, to pick up D.L., then from Brooklyn to Manhattan for the reading. The traffic was so bad that we were almost late for our own event. Karen told me the old joke that “no one drives in New York because there’s so much traffic.” In Brooklyn we cut through an orthodox Jewish neighborhood, and since it was Saturday, there was almost no one on the roads. A great time saver if you ever find yourself in the same situation.

We arrived at Purple Passion just in time. On the bill were with me were D.L., Laura, and Rachel Kramer Bussel. Funny story…

So, back when I was a frustrated, unpublished writer of erotica, I submitted a few stories to anthologies edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, and she always rejected my work. So, taking inspiration from 50 Cent’s “How to Rob” (the mix-tape track where the unsigned 50 Cent used each verse to describe how he would rob successful rap and R&B artists), I decided to write a story describing how I would fuck successful erotica writers and editors, sort of positioning myself as the “50 Cent of Erotica.” In said story, I articulated my desire to fuck Rachel Kramer Bussel from behind while shoving her face first into a plate of gourmet cupcakes. It was independently published in a little anthology sold locally in St. Louis, what were the odds that a New York editor like Rachel Kramer Bussel would ever read it?

…Well, the odds were pretty good as it turns out, because she read the book. And now we were performing at the same reading.

I asked Karen if she thought I should apologize to Rachel now that I would be seeing her in person. Karen’s advice was not to bring it up and all, and I thought that was a brilliant idea.

At the reading, Rachel stepped out of the room for a minute and while she was gone, Laura brought up the story (she’d heard me me perform it at a reading we’d done at Fetish Fair Fleamarket earlier that year). I quickly wrapped up the conversation so that we wouldn’t be talking about it by the time Rachel returned.

The reading went off without a hitch, Laura read her introduction to the book, which was hilarious, D.L. read her story and then introduced Rachel. When Rachel went up, she put in a plug for her her new collection of essays, “Sex and Cupcakes.” She held up a postcard of the cover art which features her… topless, bent over a table full of cupcakes.

I could feel the eyes burrowing in the back of my head as she held up the card, but I just kept my mouth shut and thankfully so did everyone else.

I just want to say for the record that Rachel Kramer Bussel is a fine writer and, from what I’ve been told, a very forgiving person. Not the type to hold a grudge. You should run right out and buy “Sex & Cupcakes” right after you buy “The Big Book of Domination.”

So last week I presented at the IvyQ Conference at Dartmouth University. It’s a conference of LGBTQ Ivy League students. To say the least I was intimidated. I’m used to presenting at kink conferences, not at schools I wasn’t a good enough student to get into.

Then I arrived in Hanover, New Hampshire and read the conference schedule. That’s when panic set in. I was scheduled to teach Polyamory 101 and my body acceptance workshop, Bare As You Dare. When I checked the schedule I saw that Janet W. Hardy, co-author of The Ethical Slut, was teaching an intro level polyamory class. Why would anybody take an intro to Polyamory class from me when they could take one from one of the women who (literally) wrote the book on polyamory? Then I realized that Janet W. Hardy’s class was at the same time as my Bare As You Dare class. I had to call Elaine, my partner, to calm me down and convince me everything would be okay, but I thought I’d be facing two empty classrooms.

As time for my Polyamory 101 class drew near, I was, in fact, staring at rows and rows of empty seats. This has happened to me once before. It’s not the best feeling. You feel really silly, like you threw yourself a party and no one showed up. You start to wonder how long you’re obligated to keep hoping people will come before you give up and go somewhere and weep.

Luckily, people started to trickle in and I ended up with about twenty bright-eyed and engaged students and everything went fine. One down, one to go.

Then it was time for my clothing optional body image workshop. Joe, my tech assistant, came in to help me get the room set up and he sheepishly said, “Um… I was told that you usually teach this class… in the nude.” I have to admit, I enjoy that my life leads to situations like this one.

At first I was worried that no one would show up. Then I figured that a bunch of Ivy League college students would be less willing to get naked than the older crowds I present to at kink conferences. I thought I would be the only naked one presenting to a bunch of clothed college kids, and wondered how that would feel. I was so wrong. This was the biggest, barest and best Bare As You Dare workshop I’ve ever done. I was in a room that held seventy students and it was packed. Kids just started streaming in and taking their clothes off. Presenter Vanessa Van Edwards gives out chocolates to people who answer questions during her presentations, so taking a page from her book, I gave out chocolates to students who were brave enough to get undressed. Once the chocolates started being given out, the clothes just started flying. The class basically came to a stop while I delivered chocolate to naked and half naked co-eds. By the end of the session, I was out of chocolates. I am now officially the old man who gives candy to students in exchange for taking their clothes off.

I somehow got it in my head that the class ended at 4:30, so I sped thought some stuff and cut out some parts where I talk about myself and was done around 4:20. I realized the class went to 5pm and we had 40 minutes left. I kinda panicked thinking I was going to have to fill time. I had built in a new part where I ask if any member of the audience is willing to come in front of the group, get naked and talk about their body image issues. I thought, maybe I’d get one or two takers. I lost count of how many people volunteered. Not only did we fill 40 minutes, but so many people were willing to share that we ran over time (but we only ran over time by two minutes, cause that’s how I roll).

Several students confessed to horrible traumas in their childhood and high-school years. There was so much radical honesty in that room. They didn’t just get physically naked, they got emotionally naked. There were several times when I thought I might cry, but I held it in for the sake of the students. I’ve never been so moved at a conference.

There was one young lady in the audience who caught my eye. She came to speak to me after the workshop and I flirted with her, which is probably somewhat immoral, if I think about it too hard. She told me how old she was and the next thing that came out of my mouth was, “You’re young enough to be my daughter,” and with that, any infinitesimal chance I had with her was brutally murdered.

After the workshop I went to see spoken-word artist Denice Frohman perform. She was amazing. I’m really happy to see poets at conferences like this. By the end of her set, she’d brought the crowd to their feet and received a long and very authentic standing ovation. Afterwards, I stood in line to buy a copy of her CD. When I told her I was from St. Louis, the conversation immediately turned to the situation in Ferguson. When I got back to my hotel, I listened to her entire album in a single sitting, which I almost never do. It’s that good.

Waiting for the shuttle back to my hotel, I found myself sitting in front of a building that was all lit up in the colors of the rainbow, underneath a billowing Gay Pride flag and a gentle snow fall. It was a beautiful and calming ending to a very healing event.

Friday I’m off to New York City to perform my work at the book release party for The Big Book of Domination. St. Louis, please don’t burn down while I’m gone.